Judging Obama on ghost prisons, Guantánamo and air strikes

Your report (Obama shuts network of CIA ghost prisons, 23 January) is a clear vindication to the many NGO activists, concerned citizens and parliamentarians who investigated and warned that the CIA operated "ghost prisons" on European soil, as well as rendition flights.

The European parliament's committee of inquiry into CIA rendition, of which I was a member, uncovered evidence of British and European citizens being abducted on European soil, transported through European airports and then subjected to so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques (torture) in third countries, sometimes with the knowledge of member state governments. During our investigations, US representatives would neither confirm nor deny the existence of these sites or inhuman methods. This act by President Obama shows we were right to act on behalf of European citizens, and gives us the first authoritative admission from the US government that these objectionable prison camps did in fact exist.Claude Moraes MEPLabour, London

In suggesting that the US policy of closing Guantánamo is risky for the new president (Former Guantánamo inmate is al-Qaida chief, 24 January) you draw a very odd conclusion. If 12% of prisoners released under the full rigours of the system of internment and the previous administration's legal policies have "returned to the battlefield" then the system was clearly ineffective (quite apart from other considerations such as its morality, legality and cost). The argument for closing the facility is strengthened, not weakened, by this news.Leon TannerStratford-upon-Avon

Last Friday Barack Obama ordered missile strikes against houses in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people (President orders air strikes on villages in tribal area, 24 January). A hero has quietly become some kind of monster, with blood on his hands. Almost certainly there will have been civilians among the dead.

Perhaps it goes with the territory. No one can be president these days without murdering civilians. But it is rather extraordinary how widely it is accepted that the United States of America has a right to kill civilians in this way in foreign countries. Some foreign countries, one should add. Presumably there would not be the same level of acceptance if the houses had been in Portugal, or Wales.Nicholas MaxwellLondon